After 50 years of the war on drugs, 'what good is it doing for us?'

Abuse of drugs (whether legal or not -- remember, plenty of opioid abuse was perfectly legal) can be harmful, but that doesn't mean the aim should be trying to stop the use of the specific drugs that are currently illegal, or even of any drugs.

That aim is misguided, from a cognitive liberty standpoint [1].

The aim is also misguided for other reasons, but those are hard to disentangle from the implementation. For example, the reason of injustice when the drugs that are targeted for prohibition being associated with minorities, dissidents and the counterculture, while drugs associated with the wealthy and powerful being given a free pass.

It's also tied up with the injustice of the legal system, where the wealthy and powerful can often get off with a slap on the wrist in the rare cases they are charged, while the poor and marginalized are often forced to accept plea deals because they can't afford good legal representation even if they're innocent, etc.. which leads to a disproportionate number of minorities and marginalized groups in jail.

Not sure how you can divorce the reality of the implementation of the War on Drugs from its aims here.

[1] - By cognitive liberty I mean the right of people to decide what they put in to their body and what states of mind they can achieve.

If you're telling me they can be so easily swayed by corporate messaging, and have been this way for a decade or longer, then we should scrap the apparently worthless MD degree and just let any old fart practice medicine because most people excel at internalizing the corporate branding that is supposedly the driving force behind modern medicine.

I mean that honestly. If the marketing dept of these companies are really running the shows and medical degrees count for nothing, then the sheer number of successfully treated patients shows that anyone who can listen to a pharma corp can prescribe drugs.

We can still have degrees for surgery and other hard skills.

The obvious question to ask is if the rampant drug abuse and overdoses in SF is due to decriminalization or something else? And has decriminalization made the situation better or worse?

I would argue that to prevent unintentional overdoses the best thing to do (other than improve people's lives so they don't feel a need for substances that could be harming them) is to legalize these drugs, make them pure, clearly label them, and educate people on how much of a dose in what circumstances would be an overdose.

That alone would greatly reduce the harm, and be much more effective than making/keeping these drugs illegal and forcing their users to play the lottery with a mystery drug of unknown purity and dosage every time they snort or inject.

That's not to mention the harm of being shot or assaulted by the police during an arrest for drug use, your life being ruined by a felony conviction, possibly getting raped, tortured or murdered in prison, being kept out of the legal economy afterward you get out (if you get out) because of a felony conviction, etc..

Many years ago I read of a long-term study which followed heroin addicted doctors for 20 years, in a society which guaranteed them a supply of clean heroin, and found that as long as their supply was clean and uninterrupted these heroin addicted doctors actually performed slightly better than their non-addicted colleagues, and there were minimal if any negative health consequences.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find the study since[1], so take that with a grain of salt.. and heroin is not really my subject of interest so take the following with another grain of salt, but my impression has been that pure heroin is actually not that harmful, especially compared to something like alcohol or cigarettes.

The main problem is the potential for unintentional overdose, which really shouldn't be much of a problem with pure heroin (or not much more than many other prescription drugs, whose use doesn't have any negative moral stigma attached to them). If people know the purity and dosage of the drug they're taking they tend not to take so much that it would kill them... not accidentally anyway. It happens, but it also happens plenty of other prescription drugs.

There's also addiction, but if you can get a pure, cheap supply (which should be the case where heroin is legal) and it doesn't cause any serious health consequences, then what's the problem?

[1] - If anyone else can find this study, I'd be eternally grateful.